- [Announcer] Funding for this program has been provided by The FS foundation, bringing together adults of all abilities and backgrounds as they pursue passion, prosperity and purpose.

Linda and Alvaro Pascotto.

The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

Additional support provided by these funders.

(light orchestral music) (light orchestral music) - You know, every single society that has ever existed on Earth has had music as part of their culture.

So even if it's hard sometimes to articulate exactly why music is important, we know clearly that it is.

Whether it's classical music, jazz, pop, rock, heavy metal, every single person around the world has music as part of their life.

And so there's something that we connect to in music that's very important to us as human beings.

For me, classical music has ability to range the entirety of human emotion and experience.

- It's very difficult to explain to someone, you cannot tell them what, because it's an experience you have to be there.

You have to feel it.

You have to see it.

What I do is I invite people to rehearsals because many people, when I invite them to a concert, "Oh no, I don't like classical music."

"Just come with me as my guest to rehearsal.

And you can leave an after 15 minutes if you want."

No one has ever left.

- What's great about seeing an orchestra, seeing it rather than hearing a recording is that you can actually see the different instruments and you can pick out the different instruments and what they're doing and how they're interacting with each other.

- [Madylon] You're drawn in, how could you not be drawn in?

You'll feel it.

(light orchestral music) - And then we have chamber music where the composers write for a smaller group of musicians.

And instead of having 20 violins play the first violin part, in chamber music, there's generally one musician on each part.

- It's usually anywhere from three to six people getting together and playing a piece of music together without a conductor.

So they have to learn the piece really well so that the only cues they get are from each other.

So they must know the piece intimately.

- It gives the composers the chance to really work with the colors of the individual instruments and let the individual instruments shine.

- It's also an intimate experience for the players, because you're basically following each other's body language and cues, and you have to rehearse enough that you feel the music the same way, rhythmically and phrasing and intonation and everything.

I was really looking forward to the Borodin Quartet.

I knew that it would be a great group with great people who I haven't really played with before.

And it's a great piece, but it's very concentrated and intense.

Magic can happen that way.

(light orchestral music) - What I love about chamber music is watching the musicians play because there is a hyper-awareness.

They're looking at each other and the tiny, tiny movements, they breathe together, their bows come up and they make a silent agreement about we're starting here now, or they'll congratulate each other like, wow, that was really, you know, you'll see an eyebrow go up.

It was literally music written to be heard in a chamber, not in a great big hall.

So the intimacy of the chamber music is so wonderful.

(light orchestral music) - This piece is a very Russian and very romantic quartet, and it's very lush and has a lot of great melodies.

And the reason it's loved so much is because of the movement with the melody called the nocturne and the third movement.

It just repeats this gorgeous melody again and again, starting with cello and then with the violin playing it, and then there's a development section.

And then it comes back at the end with cello and violin doing it sort of together, alternating as if they're singing to each other or speaking with each other.

So it's just, it's kind of very romantic that way in the approach.

But the melody itself is just absolutely gorgeous.

And it being a nocturne, it's so appropriate because it's just like singing at night.

(light orchestral music) We were very excited to play.

We had rehearsed well.

It was a great group.

We had a lot of fun together.

One of the staff came back and said, "There's a storm coming, so can you come play now?"

We're like, "Oh, okay."

And so we all gather up our things and just go off to the stage.

And it was already quite windy and it made me really nervous.

We got halfway through the third movement, the beautiful nocturne that everybody loves.

And that's when things started to go a little bit funny.

The rain started coming a little bit and your mind is thinking, well, it's only a little bit of rain.

If it gets worse, that's bad for the instruments, but a few drops won't hurt.

So you just keep playing and just hoping, hoping, hoping, make it to the end of the movement.

And that went fine.

But then in the fourth movement, which is quite long and involved, well, things started to go haywire.

(laughing) (light orchestral music) I think the first thing that happened is that Yurika's music just flew right off at one point and had to help her get it back and start again.

(light orchestral music) Milan, the violist, got up and he was sort of playing standing up and then more wind came and things started blowing around.

And then we stopped again and 'cause it looked like all was lost, but then Xiao-Dong said, "No, we have to finish it."

- We're gonna finish it, we're gonna finish it.

- Yes, thank you.

(all laughing) - We're gonna finish it, we have to - Thank you for staying.

This is take three.

(all laughing) (indistinct) (indistinct) - Okay.

- Yeah.

(light orchestral music) Okay, and.

(light orchestral music) (crowd cheering) - Got that last page finished and the crowd went nuts and we gathered everything up.

And then just then there was a huge bang, something fell down and we got, I thought that the whole thing came down.

I was, I was so scared.

So we just like ran off stage and really, really exciting.

And I'm glad he made us finish it.

I am, because it felt better.

It felt better to finish it.

- Last year, Classical Tahoe wasn't able to have the full orchestra with a full audience.

And so this year, some of these musicians haven't seen each other in two years and to perform with an ensemble with an audience is just going to be something spectacular.

- What we have here is a group of highly skilled musicians that come together, leaving their normal habitat to come create one here.

- And even though they have a lot of rehearsals during those three weeks, they're starting to get to know each other.

And so there's this nonverbal communication that happens.

- And the way that we listen to each other, you know, like if the principal bassoon puts a note at a certain place, you can feel everybody gravitate towards that because we're all very sensitive.

And so that awareness, that hyper-awareness, it's like a professional dancer dancing with somebody and, you know, they're kind of feeding off of each other.

I think that's what we do.

- And it's my job to try to help allow them to get as comfortable as possible, as quick as possible so that they all feel like they can get back down to what we're here to do, which is to make music and feel like what we're doing is the most effective and a unified musical voice that we can.

- Professional conductors have a way of bringing an orchestra together.

- Mendelssohn's "Italian Symphony" is so effervescent and bubbly and exciting and youthful.

He wrote it when he was so young.

He died when he's young, too, so everything he wrote was when he was young, but you know, I think each of the works has so much energy.

I mean the first and last movements have so much, requires so much virtuosity as well as just sheer speed and velocity.

(light orchestral music) (audience applauding) (crowd cheering) I also want to note that this no clapping between movement thing didn't happen for 100 years.

So Mendelssohn, feel free to clap between movements, probably expected at the time.

Sometimes he repeated movements because it was like an encore, but any case, yeah, that whole thing started much, much later on.

So clap away.

(audience applauding) The audience's energy and their presence is integral to what makes the performance exciting and memorable.

And so as musicians, we always want to create those memorable moments for us and for our audiences, and to be in a beautiful location, like Tahoe, to be with these incredible musicians and the greatest people, as well as musicians, and to have an audience that has been looking forward to orchestral music together, I think it's going to be a spectacular moment for the 10th anniversary season of Classical Tahoe.

(grand orchestral music) (audience applauding) (crowd cheering) (light orchestral music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program has been provided by The FS Foundation, bringing together adults of all abilities and backgrounds as they pursue passion, prosperity and purpose.

Linda and Alvaro Pascotto.

The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

Additional support provided by these funders.

(light orchestral music)